Personal Education Plans (PEP)

Personal Education Plans are important as they are intended to promote and prioritize the education of young people in public care, as a vital part of the care plans and statutory reviews. Again the Guidance for the Education of Young People in Public Care (DfEE and DoH, 2000: 28) highlights their purpose:

Every child and young person in public care needs a Personal Education Plan which ensures access to services and support; contributes to stability, minimizes disruption and broken schooling; signals particular and special needs; establishes clear goals and acts as a record of progress and achievement.

Personal Education Plans are very similar to IEPs in that they need to include targets and objectives for the young person to achieve within a set time frame and with specified resources. They may relate to academic achievement or social, personal or behavioral targets. They also need to state who will actually be responsible for seeing that the plan is actioned, monitored and reviewed. Local authorities and independent special residential schools have produced their own Personal Education Plan documents, but model plans have been produced by voluntary sector child care organizations such as the National Children’s Bureau Personal Education Plan for Children and Young People in Public Care (Sandiford, 1999). They should encompass the following areas:

■ an achievement record;

■ the identification of developmental and educational needs;

■ short-term targets;

■ long-term plans and aspirations.

It is a requirement that PEPs are reviewed and rewritten at least twice a year, to coincide with the Social Services Statutory Review of the young person’s care plan, but many schools feel that they are more successfully monitored if, like IEPs, they are rewritten on a termly basis. PEPs will indeed reflect IEP targets or Statement of Education Needs’ objectives, if the young person has special education needs, but if not, they may remain focused on ensuring that all resources and support are in place to enable access to and engagement in the curriculum and school life for the young person. Undoubtedly as well as supplying essential information, they necessitate inter-agency dialogue, as can be seen from the case study illustrated above. The importance of the young person’s education is also expounded by the PEP to everyone involved in any type of corporate parenting. However, it is the social worker’s responsibility to manage the statutory review process of which the PEP forms a part.

Discussion

‘The introduction of PEPs was also an issue for schools. Many teachers felt strongly that where a school has effective monitoring systems PEPs were unnecessary. Many teachers also explained how difficult it is to complete PEPs, due to the number of people involved in the process’ (Thomas, 2003). What reasons can you think of that support the need for PEPs? How can schools maintain a consistent approach to PEPs?